Crank

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s film follows Chev Chelios, a hitman who wakes to be told he is poisoned and will die the moment his adrenaline drops. The premise sets a rule the film keeps to: Chelios never gets a recovery beat or a scene to think in, and every sequence hunts the next stimulant rather than a pause. The jitter comes from the shooting, not the cut. Instead of 35mm the production shot digital videotape on Canon XL2 and Sony CineAlta HDC-F950 cameras, and Neveldine and Taylor ran the A and B cameras themselves, one on the wide and one on the close up. Taylor called the rollerblade footage the hardest part, since Neveldine could not be tethered to a cable while blading at up to 30mph. Jason Statham did his own fight and car stunts, including the fight inside a helicopter 3,000 feet above Los Angeles. Permission was refused for the scene played in public in Chinatown, so that street was rebuilt in San Pedro. The film closes on Chelios falling, and the 2009 sequel Crank: High Voltage picks up from that fall. A good fit if you want a lead who never gets his breath back and a camera running beside him. Not for anyone who cannot watch the Chinatown scene with someone else in the room.